Sunday, January 20, 2013

Against the Theist’s Nightmare of Hell

Would you be surprised to learn that great multitudes of
people still talk seriously about an afterlife of heaven or hell--even after
science has demonstrated that the ancient worldviews are replete with superstitions;
after humans have been physically up to the heavens and on the moon and haven’t
found any gods (or even any super-intelligent aliens); after we’ve come to
understand the geological function of volcanoes; and have social scientific knowledge
of religions, according to which, for example, the religious metaphor of the
divine Judge derives from psychedelic experience and was exploited in the
ancient world and in the current Muslim one to justify earthly dominance
hierarchies, by implicitly deifying human monarchs?

You shouldn’t be so surprised, for the reason given by
Richard Dawkins: preposterous religious memes persist because they’re taught to
children who will, for obvious evolutionary reasons, accept and repeat
absolutely anything you tell them and then grow up and have to assimilate that
early input with what they later more responsibly come to learn about the world,
as adults. People who are “born again,” who convert to a religion after a
traumatic experience aren’t exceptions to this rule, since the trauma reduces
them to childlike, passive receivers of information, which is why even an adult
can join the most ludicrous cult. And as I hypothesize elsewhere, the memes
originate from the hallucinations reported by those with altered states of
consciousness; the vision of hell, in particular, would derive from nightmares.

Given this dynamic, there are two sorts of theists who
believe there’s an eternal hell awaiting many of us in the afterlife. First,
there’s the unapologetic fire-and-brimstone preacher who sides with the most
primitive, literalistic theology, backlashing against modern naturalism. This
is the sort of person who stands on a big city street corner and tries to scare
modern, educated people with an image of God as a sadistic torturer. In short,
this is a child in an adult’s body. Her fiery sermons are literally echoes of
the tales implanted in her when she was either too young to know any better or
too vulnerable to ask questions. When dodging the saliva emitted by the
fundamentalist’s exoteric declarations about the afterlife, you might consider
bringing along a pacifier and offering it to that babe in the woods who’s
throwing a tantrum.

Then there’s the theist who’s forced as an adult to
reconsider her religious lessons because of the perceived force of the chief
alternative, science-centered worldview. This sort of theist is embarrassed by
the blatant foolishness of espousing ancient ignorance in the midst of so much
scientific knowledge and technological power. At the very least, if you’re
going to hold on to theism even in the 21st century, you’ve got to be humble
about it; moreover, you’ve got to be clever and subtle, slipping the gist of
the ancient worldview past savvy modernists, hiding the core absurdities in
Trojan Horses rather than shouting unmodified forms of them from the rooftops.

A Moderate Defense of Hell

C. S. Lewis was a paradigmatic example of the latter sort of
theist, since he taught at Oxford and Cambridge, which are places filled with
very smart people. Lewis was brought up in a Christian family, and he rebelled
as a teenager by turning to atheism and then re-embraced Christianity as an
adult. He popularized the Christian creed by taking the ancient edge off of it,
modernizing it so that Christians wouldn’t have to feel ashamed of repeating
their memes. The author of the Thinking Christian blog, Tom Gilson, is in
Lewis’s camp and summarizes Lewis’s formulation of the doctrine of hell:

“For centuries Christian imagery of hell was dominated by
the fire metaphor. In the 20th century, C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce led many of us to see it instead as a place where
people continue their life’s trajectory into eternity….

“Both groups [those who obey God and those whom God obeys] continue
to live the lives they created for themselves. The one who seeks God on earth
will find him in eternity. The one who rejects God on earth will live in
eternity without God, just as he or she has chosen on earth….

“So as each person carries his or her personality into eternity, what’s different about heaven or hell? Simply this: the presence or absence of God and all of his
goodness. Here on earth, God is active even among those who deny him. Where
there is love on earth it is an expression of God’s reality and his action.
Where there is goodness here it is his goodness being manifested.“In heaven that goodness will be multiplied infinitely. In hell it will be gone.”

So instead of picturing God as a zealous defender of his
moral principles, eagerly torturing sinners for daring to defy him or for
pretending that he doesn’t even exist and that Jesus wasn’t a superhuman action
hero, the moderate Christian thinks of God as only an accidental, indirect torturer. For this Christian,
it’s axiomatic that God is the source of all good things while humans and
demons are the sources of all bad things. Thus, heaven is caused directly by
God, since heaven is being in God’s presence, while hell is caused directly by
sinners. Hell is God’s withdrawing from the scene in obedience to those who
don’t want him around. In this way God, who is perfectly moral and loving, would
still do no harm despite the eternal suffering of billions of sentient beings
whom God created, since God would merely respect their free choice to reject his
offer of salvation. God rushed out a flawed species when he created Humanity
1.0, but the patch for our software is freely available if only we’re willing
to accept that we require Jesus’ sacrificial punishment for our sins, in which
case we become Humanity 2.0, fit for eternal life with God. If instead you
value your ego and your independence, God will let you reap what you sow, and
only later when it’s too late will you rue the error of your ways, and weep and
gnash your teeth in frustration that what you wanted all along, a life apart
from God, isn’t worth what you thought. You vainly figure you know best in
rejecting theism and Christianity in particular, but it turns out your
God-given intellect is flawed and you’ll ironically create only hell for
yourself, a hell that’s the destiny of modern secular civilization.

The Arbitrariness of Theistic Metaphors

Thus runs this pitch for Christian respectability despite
the baggage of the ancient hell doctrine. What annoys me most about this explanation
of hell is the Orwellian doublespeak in which it’s couched. You know those stereotypical
defense attorneys who are charged with defending a rapist and who brazenly continue
the rapist’s attack in the courtroom by blaming the victim, dragging her name
through the mud, accusing her of seducing the rapist, of wearing sexy clothes,
of being a liar and a whore, and all while praising the rapist’s character? The
moderate Christian who apologizes for the Christian notion of hell in C. S.
Lewis’s way is rather like one of those lawyers. Granted, there are many people
who do escape earthly life without receiving just punishment for their
misdeeds, but there are also many non-Christians whose crucial misdeeds would
be merely that they don’t measure up to God’s irrelevant, superhuman standards
and that they reject Christianity. In other words, there are plenty of
non-Christians who lead decent lives--flawed, to be sure, but on the whole much
closer to Good than to Evil. And yet even the moderate Christian, who doesn’t
spit while screeching mantras about hell and Jezus, maintains that those decent
folks will be punished forever when they physically die. But the kicker is that
this Christian blames those decent people for their eternal suffering, since
God’s hands are tied; indeed, the unsaved sinners merely punish themselves, by ironically
getting exactly what they wanted all along because they didn’t know any better.
For this Christian, God is a rewarder and not a punisher, since he can’t get
his hands dirty, being the almighty transcendent entity that occupies a higher
plane. God must delegate the job of torturing sinners to demons or to the
sinners themselves; God can’t personally thrust the pitchfork, because then he
wouldn’t be a dignified father figure worthy of worship.

Of course this is nonsense on the face of it. God supposedly
incarnated himself as a lowly Jew in Roman-occupied Judea in the first century
CE. You can’t get any lower than that, and indeed Christians worship God
precisely because they believe he lowered himself to our level. Why shouldn’t
God then lower himself to the level of a fallen angel to ensure that sinners
receive their just punishment, by personally torturing them? At least, God
should be metaphysically capable of doing so and this shouldn’t tarnish God’s
reputation for being--at heart, as it were--a transcendent entity, since the
Christian already praises God for debasing himself.

No, the moderate Christian says God is blameless for hell,
because this Christian is forced to select which parts of the Bible to count as literal and
her interpretation of scripture is guided by the social aim of having her
religion conform to modern expectations. Thus, Gilson speaks of the lake of
fire and of the weeping and gnashing of teeth in outer darkness as metaphors,
but insists that God is literally good. Heaven is where earthly goodness is
infinitely multiplied, he says; indeed, all earthly goodness is only a
manifestation of God’s goodness. Again, God is responsible for everything
that’s right while humans and our demonic allies are to blame for everything
that’s wrong. But again, one problem with this is that, from an esoteric, mystical
viewpoint, the Christian’s choice of which parts of the Bible to treat as
metaphorical is arbitrary. If as Gilson says, “There is definitely a hell” but
“No one on earth knows exactly what it will be like,” how do we know that God
is good? Leaving aside the atrocious Old Testament descriptions of God’s
character, why aren’t the Bible’s comforting descriptions of God just as
metaphorical as its terrifying descriptions of hell? Clearly, if God is an
infinite, transcendent, supernatural cause of everything in the universe, and
isn’t identical with anything he created, God can’t literally be good or
fatherly since those are understood to be natural properties.

The Christian has two responses to this point. First, she
can maintain, on the contrary, that goodness is supernatural and miraculous and
that therefore a transcendent being can literally be good. There are at least
two problems with this response. First, there are naturalistic explanations of
morality which the Christian must then entirely reject. Second and more
important, if goodness is supernatural, transcendent, and miraculous, so that
God can be said to literally have that quality, we lose our reason for thinking
that God should be good, because we lose our understanding of what goodness is
in the first place. All we understand of goodness is the limited kind of virtue
and altruism we’re familiar with in social species such as ours. If goodness is
really something supernatural, our notion of goodness must be just as
metaphorical as our notion of hell, in which case the cost of saying that God
is literally good is that this statement loses its meaning.

The second response is that we know God is good, because we
know God through Jesus, and Jesus was good in a way that we can understand. Unfortunately,
this response rests likewise on verbal sleight of hand. Given that the
metaphorical nature of a description of transcendent reality can mislead and
confuse us, a physical model of that reality should be just as flawed and thus
idolatrous. This is why Jews and Muslims forbid all representations of God. The Christian comes along and says that
Jesus represents God, because Jesus was miraculously connected to the deity,
allowing God’s transcendent reality to flow into his natural body. Jesus had a
miraculous birth and thus he’s an exceptional image of divine reality, not a
misleading idol but a reflection of God’s character. Jesus alone was
“begotten,” not “made.”

Alas, this response merely substitutes the emptiness of
“Jesus’s miraculous birth” for that of “transcendent goodness.” Just as no one
would have any idea what God’s literal goodness would be like, assuming
goodness is really supernatural and thus naturally inconceivable, no one would
know what the connection between God and Jesus amounts to were this connection
one of a miraculous birth. Thus, we couldn’t understand how a mammal could
embody an infinite creator of the universe, let alone confirm the embodiment. So
on the contrary, we wouldn’t know God
through Jesus; sure, you could mouth the words, but you wouldn’t know what
you’re talking about. The verbal trick, you see, is to rely on the now-archaic
meaning of “beget,” which is of course a word for the very natural process of
procreation. The distinction, then, between making and begetting is just that between
designing and building something, on the one hand, and sexually reproducing,
causing DNA and proteins to design and build the thing, on the other. Both are
natural processes to the extent that they’re understood, and so even if Jesus
was begotten rather than made by God, this wouldn’t make for any supernatural
bridge between the two.

The upshot is that the
exoteric preference for any description of transcendent reality is arbitrary.
For the theist, everything in nature is indirectly touched by God, including
every word of so-called divinely inspired scripture and even each piece of
feces left behind by everything that walks, crawls, flies, or swims. Thus,
goodness and Jesus both lose their special connection to God. If God is
literally good, he might as well also literally be feces. This is because the
distinction between the supernatural and the natural is lost in theism: if
everything is an effect of God, everything indicates some aspect of its divine
source, and so everything in the universe represents God to some extent. Jesus
would be nothing special and you might as well worship feces for representing
God’s potentials for brownness and funky odours. The problem is that if everything represents God to some extent,
we still know nothing about the divine being, because nature offers no
univocal, coherent picture of its source. For example, there’s both good and
evil in nature, so we’d need some conception that combines those opposites, to coherently
picture the all-encompassing, transcendent seed. You would truly need a grand theory
of everything which reconciles all natural opposites, to learn about God by
learning about the results of his work. Short of that theory, fragmentary
knowledge of nature is useless for theistic purposes, and so all metaphorical descriptions of God are
misleading and arbitrary due to their incompleteness.

Besides the social reason for saying that God is good rather
than also evil, there’s an existential reason for doing so. The moderate
Christian wants a comforting myth to escape her obligation to face up to her
alienation. As I argue elsewhere, when you follow the logic of the root
monotheistic metaphor, which compares the transcendent cause of nature to a
person, you end up with Mainlander’s conjecture that even a good deity would become
corrupt and insane because of his omnipotence and isolation (see here and
here). Thus, far from being merely good, according to the moderate
Christian’s politically correct, G-rated theism for domesticated pantywaists,
God would indeed be a tyrant who, we can only hope, would have killed himself
in the process of creating the undead cosmos we inhabit. The notion that God’s
character would be defined by goodness is just part of an adorable scheme for
some mammals to feel at home in ultimate reality, whereas the existential task for
grownups is to reconcile ourselves to our metaphysical homelessness. If God is
good, or as Muslims say, great, hell might as well be a lake of fire. If
anything, taking the anthropomorphic notion of transcendent reality seriously,
God would be a monster beyond our wildest nightmares and that monster would be
our landlord for all time. That’s authentic monotheism, and this is why
polytheists like the ancient Romans were appalled by Judaism. Theism for
extroverts pictures a society of gods rather than just a solitary and thus
alienated deity who would be horrified to look in a mirror.

So, then, God would be neither good nor bad, but would have
to be both, which is just to say that God’s character would transcend our understanding.
The moderate Christian’s explanation of hell just arbitrarily replaces one
dubious theistic metaphor with another. The preferred metaphor is in fact an
idol, whether it’s the image of God as benevolence (rather than also as evil)
or as Jesus (rather than also as feces). And so when the theist says that God
benevolently gives us unrepentant sinners what we want, by leaving us alone for
eternity, which just so happens to bring these sinners unremitting misery, you
can take comfort in knowing that this metaphor of God’s pure goodness is no
more credible than the ancient Aztec’s more manly and aggressive metaphor of
God as a bloodthirsty tyrant.

The Implausibility of Theistic Metaphors

That’s just the underlying problem with the C. S.
Lewis-style defense of hell. There are many more specific problems with it. For
starters, can we say that God merely leaves bad people to their devices, that
they are solely responsible for their eternal suffering, since God merely
respects their free choice even though God knows the dire consequence of that
choice? This is analogous to the parent who allows her daughter to walk across
a highway blindfolded, knowing that she’ll be run over and have to spend the
rest of her life suffering in a wheelchair. Would that child be solely to blame
for her recklessness? Well, were the child old enough to know better, she’d at
least be partly to blame, but since she’d also be immature compared to her
parent, the parent would share some of the responsibility for the consequent
suffering. Now, the Christian can pretend that the evidence of what will happen
if we die without accepting Jesus as our saviour is as clear as that of what
will happen if you walk down a highway blindfolded, but this would be an empty
bluff. Christian beliefs are mostly irrational. In any case, God would be more responsible for hell than would that
human parent for her daughter’s poor decision, since God would sustain hell by
keeping the souls of the non-Christian sinners alive, whereas the human parent
wouldn’t be free to end her child’s suffering by killing her. Even were hell
only in the minds of sinners, God could end hell by annihilating the sinners. God
isn’t bound by social laws that protect people’s right to life, and he should
be able to break what he’s made, such as a human soul.

Moreover, to say that God keeps those sinners alive forever
even though he knows that their afterlife will be nothing but suffering, out of
“respect” for their freedom or “love” of their individuality is just to engage
in the callous defense lawyer’s sort of doubletalk. Suppose a person offers her
pet dog a choice between drinking poison or water, the dog drinks the poison,
and is forced to live thereafter in agony because the dog owner refuses to have
the dog humanely killed to end its suffering. Would we praise the character of
this dog owner? No, instead we’d suspect that she sadistically derives some
satisfaction from witnessing the natural result of the dog’s poor choice of
food. Likewise, however many signs God might deploy to point us in the right
direction while we’re in our mortal bodies, God would still have much superior
knowledge of the consequences of our actions as well as the power to spare us
the pain we might earn for ourselves, by putting us down in a humane fashion.
If instead God allows hell to continue forever, we might just as well call God
sadistic than respectful or loving towards everyone. In fact, calling this sort
of God simply “good” would be as grotesque as calling a cult leader good for
allowing his minions to torture themselves when he could put an end to the
charade by coming clean on his lies of omission.

It goes without saying, though, that the foregoing defense
of the myth of hell is a nonstarter, because the notion of freedom here is a
pernicious oversimplification. There’s a fallacy in assuming that because a
person chooses his personality while alive on Earth, therefore she chooses it
for eternity. On the contrary, a person may make life-altering choices on the
explicit assumption that they’re suitable only under the natural circumstances
she finds herself in here and now. For example, someone born in a Brazilian
slum may choose to become a criminal, but this choice is context-dependent. Our
knowledge of our natural circumstances would be far different from that of our
supernatural ones: for example, an atheist justifies her life decisions
according to her knowledge of where she stands merely in the natural world,
because she thinks her knowledge of that world is far more certain than any
speculation about what will happen to her when she dies. The theist knows no
better but just frivolously gambles on a fantasy. And anyway, most so-called
theists reason in the atheistic (rational, protoscientific) manner, ignoring
their religion when real-world consequences are at stake. So the theist
demonstrates her effrontery when she blames
the suffering in hell entirely on the sufferers, because they supposedly choose
that fate and God only lets that choice unfold. There’s no such choice, so
there’s nothing here for God to honour. There’s
no choice to reject the overwhelming evidence for theism, since there’s no longer
any such evidence (after globalization’s culture clashes, Enlightenment
philosophy, and the Scientific Revolution), and there’s no choice of how we
want to live for eternity, since almost no one lives as if she really think
she’ll live that long.

(The moderate theist should look into the philosophical
distinction between a symbol’s intension and its extension. Our knowledge
extends to the intensional meaning of our thoughts, to how we conceive of
things, not necessarily to the facts that may underlie those meanings. For
example, you may admire Mark Twain but not Samuel Clemens, not realizing that
the two people are identical. Likewise, you might approve of your criminality as
a way of dealing with your current situation, not appreciating the supernatural
consequences of that decision.)

The Legends of Heaven and Hell

In so far as hell is worth speaking of at all today, we
should think of the idea of hell as a legend deriving from the psychedelic
nature of ancient near-death experiences. What seems to happen when you die is
that your brain loses sensory input and manufactures a dream world to keep your
mind occupied as your body tries futilely to repair itself. Before brain death,
different parts of your brain are enlisted in this final project, one of which
is your conscience. In the back of your mind, you must know or fear that you’re
dying and so you philosophically survey the events of your life and ask
yourself how you think you fared. Your life “flashes before your lives” and you
judge yourself. Just as time can feel sped up or slowed down in an altered
state of consciousness, brought on by an entheogen, for example, so too time
might seem to stop altogether when you’re in your last dream state, as something like DMT
floods your consciousness with bizarre imagery. If you approve of your life and
you generally think well of yourself, or at least if you think you did the best
you could while alive, you’ll forgive your faults and bless yourself with a
pleasant final dream that seems to last forever (until your brain expires and
your dream ends). If instead you feel generally ashamed of what you did with
your life, you’ll curse yourself with a lasting experience of hell. Evidently,
people have had some such experience and have then sometimes recuperated, living
to interpret it in the naïve, theistic fashion. They then ranted and raved about
the spirit world and started a cult which evolved into or contributed to a religion. Moreover,
we all have lesser, preparatory versions of these experiences in our nightly
dreams and while we lie in bed, dwelling on the day’s events and visualizing
what we want to do tomorrow.

So the God who allegedly judges us is really just a deeper
part of our mind, the part that’s left when our egoistic illusions are stripped
away, when we lose the incentive to play our social games, and we’re entirely
on our own to think about ourselves, to play the introvert’s favourite game.
Then we render our honest, final judgment and use the same neural machinery
that conjures both our sleeping and our waking dreams, to bring that judgment
to life in a subjectively everlasting experience of bliss or pain. Of course,
if you happen to die by having your brain somehow instantly destroyed, you’ll
pass over this experience of the “afterlife,” thus slipping through the cracks
of God’s hands.

6 comments:

That last part about "playing the introverts favorite game" is very interesting. You seem to talk about introversion versus extroversion (and esoteric versus exoteric) quite a lot. You should write about that specifically one day. I would like to see what your view of human history is on this level. Do you think the exoteric always overwhelms the esoteric... that personal experiences are lost in the sea of the exoteric? Things would have certainly played out differently if Jesus had been an introvert!

That is a good idea for a blog post. I'll get to it in a few weeks, since the next ones are on cognitive science and transhumanism, death, and Islam. I've already indirectly done one on introversion ("Revenge of the Omega Men"), but maybe one tying together the two distinctions, as you suggest, would be interesting.

But I wonder why you think the character of Jesus isn't that of an introvert. Didn't he spend a long time alone in the desert? Wasn't he iconoclastic, railing against social standards instead of trying to fit in? Didn't he even go as far as to intentionally get himself killed, staying true to his inner vision instead of making a phony out of himself trying to please everyone else (the Pharisees, Romans, hypocrites, etc)? I don't think introversion is quite the same as shyness. There's a broader antisocial component which Jesus certainly had.

Thanks. I imagine a believer could say that if you had a near-death experience of hell, it would be so traumatic that you'd repress the memory (not that a memory of it could have formed in the first place). Clearly, the simplest explanation of a near-death experience is that the person is dreaming/hallucinating, since she's not brain dead.

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In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.